Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Playa Grande, Costa Rica

I have never been much of a surf beach kind of guy. I grew up next to a chicken farm, a long way from any ocean. Plus I have issues with public nudity stemming from low self-esteem and a rigorous Lutheran upbringing.

I’m never going to have that tan, those dreads, or figure out the cool but indecipherable hand signals. Sad, but as I close in on my 48th birthday, I’ve just about come to terms with it.

So it was with some trepidation that I changed into my board shorts in the rental car’s sticky hot front seat, struggled into my shortie wetsuit like it was a sausage casing and walked gingerly across the hot sand and into the waves. I wasn’t going surfing, but I spent good money on an underwater camera housing and I was going to do the next best thing, take pictures of other people surfing. More expensive, but requiring fewer motor skills.

Playa Grande is reported to be one of the premier surfing spots in Costa Rica, and the mob of tanned, athletic specimens of both sexes bore that out. I felt like something bloated and pale that had washed up with the tide.

But I was ready to face death in the form of monster waves, lethal rip tides and extreme risk of sunburn. I marched bravely into the breakers, my nerve bolstered by the presence of a gaggle of teenage girls standing in waist deep water a hundred yards offshore. It took some time, but I made it out to the breakers, and spent a lot of time bobbing over, under and sometimes within the maw of curling walls of water. Four feet of surf isn’t a lot in Oahu North Shore terms, but when you’re a balding middle age man in a neoprene suit, it focusses your attention.

I eventually decided the trick was to predict the spot where breaking wave, rapidly paddlng surfer and camera should intersect. Like a lot of things in life, I make it look a lot harder than it probably should. Over the course of four hours this happened roughly...once. But on top of that, I built an extensive image collection of blurry sand, bubbles and clouds. Sort of like if I put my camera in the washing machine. Which by the time the sun set, was how my entire body was feeling.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

It takes a large amount of self confidence and character to joke with your own person. On top of that it was an entertaining chronicle. Thank you!

You should try surfing. by identifying where the wave intersects with the paddling you solved the biggest challenge in surfing, and frankly most of us see mostly sand and bubbles 99% of the time anyway!

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INTRODUCTION

For much of my adult life, I have been lucky enough to get paid doing the things I love most. My work as a itinerant travel and wildlife photographer has sent me around the world and across all seven continents.

Over the last two decades, I have had ample opportunity to appreciate the absurdities of life on the road, having once spent 27 memorable hours during my first trip to Kenya digging a bogged safari truck out using only a sauce pan. In addition to my work in Africa, I have traveled extensively in Alaska, Australia, Antarctica and Asia.

I hope to work my way through the rest of the alphabet in a timely fashion.

Each year, I spend five or six months on the road. Along the way, I try to make time to scribble something in my notebooks. More often than not, it’s about whatever mishap has befallen me on any particular day. This collection offers a random sample from those journals, notebooks and emails.